Too much coffee could be grounds for bankruptcy!
WHEN I saw a headline in a newspaper, ‘Drinking three cups of coffee a day can extend your life,’ I thought it was too good to be true.
Nevertheless, I read on. Researchers at London’s Queen Mary University and Budapest’s Semmelweis University discovered that drinking three cups of coffee a day provides a 17% lower risk of us dying from heart disease and a 21 per cent lower risk of dying from a stroke.
A spokesman for Queen Mary University said that a moderate daily intake of coffee ‘is not cardiovascular harmful – and may even be beneficial’. But as I read on, I saw there was a ‘catch’.
And it wasn’t a small one… Before I reveal what it is, I should tell you I like a cup of coffee and can always manage a second cup, especially when I’m in a meeting or working on some new material.
That newspaper headline caused me to wonder if I could manage a third cup later in the day – before I realised if the caffeine intake from three cups of coffee was racing through me, I’d probably be so wired I’d be up until dawn, unable to sleep.
This would put me off drinking another three cups that day, immediately putting paid to my brand-new, short-lived, health regime!
But that wasn’t the ‘catch’ I was referring to. This is ‘The Catch’...
The experts behind the report specify that as instant coffee – and some other foods – contains a potentially-harmful substance called acrilamyde, their recommendation is that we should avoid instant and instead drink three ‘good quality’ cups of coffee a day.
Now if you’ve bought a ‘good quality’ latte, Americano or whatever you prefer from a coffee shop recently, you probably paid around £3 for it, give or take a few pence.
If you buy three of them every day (I see the maths experts among you are way ahead of me) you’ll spend £63 a week.
Perhaps the experts who prepared the report should have included a section explaining the effect that spending £3,285 a year on hot drinks has on the human body!